Re: next fall…yes, but college students are behind the times. I’m still surprised how many have never heard of a blog before my class (maybe I shouldn’t be). And if can get an open-source thing going in Springfield, fall might be the right time. Who knows?

ISO9000 quality standards for companies provide a good equivalent. There have levels of ISO9000 certification – Level 0 (the most lenient) is basically “Say what you do and do what you say”.

No reason bloggers can’t have a BSO Level 0 certification that does likewise – provide a template checklist, and the blogger can say “yes”,”no”,”it depends” for each item, and add more items and explanations as s/he desires.
Thus the bloggers still have complete freedom but the reader still gets guidance, and a handy as-yet-nonexistent “Level 0 certification” icon could allow the reader to easily tell the certified from the occult.

As for the $$ on your lap, try not to count it before it’s hatched; I bet things will have moved fast enough that by then (fall intersession is a year from now?) something else will already be in place.

How about providing/exposing training and other (including editorial) support to help those bloggers who might _want_ it?

For example, while Poynter has online courses, they’re lightweight, “peripheral” ones that don’t look as though they cover the basics. And the IRE currently doesn’t have any membership category that would permit entrance to citizen journalists. And some of us live far from where journalism courses are taught.

J Steele, I’ve been hoping for an online “piecework” editor who’d charge (PayPal?) on a per-minute or per-post basis – and, ideally, also make the “before” and “after” text accessible on his site, so others could both
a) see what a great job s/he does,
and
b) recognize how their own work might improve.

The blogging tool could give 3 choices – publish, save as draft, submit to editor – and for the latter, provide a list of editors – currently online, or maybe ones you’ve used/liked in the past – you’d select one and it would get emailed to them (and a price would be magically agreed on, incantation TBD).

“assumes an edited product would be ‘better’”

There is plenty of unambiguously crappy writing out there; some of us who recognize and regret the ‘quality’ of our contributions would be grateful for help in doing better.

BTW I think the “ideas and infrastructure for blogger journalism” discussion could be very productive, and needs a larger set of contributors.

and Andy, any chance that you could teach the first online “citizen journalism” class? with lots of applied homework, of course…

So I’m being a little dumb because later in the entry I make the case for blogging being blogging and blogging journalism being its own thing (or at least I think I do). So why not independent blog editors? I’m sure a way could be found to make it work without slowing down the blogging process. Perhaps the wiki is a good example.

But it seems to me there would have to be some kind of institutional recognition so that blog readers, and journos who wish to make us of them, might know that they’re dealing with an edited product.

Of course, this assumes an edited product would be “better”–the same assumption Outing makes. And I’m not so sure it’s a good assumption.

(Not that I have the qualifications to be an editor, but I’m always looking for ways to get rid of this day job!)